Comcast outages continue even in areas with PG&E power restored

Tue Oct 15 17:52:51 UTC 2019

On 10/14/19 5:58 PM, Brandon Martin wrote:
> On 10/14/19 8:26 PM, Michael Thomas wrote:
>> So when we were working on this 20 years ago at Cisco, there was a 
>> tremendous amount of effort to deal with the issue of e911 and 
>> generally battery backup. I'm really surprised to hear that though we 
>> went through a lot of effort to deal with the CPE, that the cable 
>> plant was the actual problem. The cable companies should, imo, be 
>> held to the same standard as the telcos. Maybe even moreso these days 
>> since IP has taken over everything. The need for reliable e911 hasn't 
>> gone away just because the bits have turned into IP bit these days.
>
> They get around it, at least in part, by selling it as a "VoIP" 
> service rather than "phone service".
>
> AT&T does the same with U-Verse voice.  You can still buy POTS from 
> AT&T, but it's a separate product with a completely different pricing 
> structure from the U-Verse voice product.
>
> Voice over HFC networks is sometimes sold as a POTS-like service. I've 
> only heard of this happening in places where the LEC and cable 
> provider happen to end up being one-in-the-same.  In those cases, yeah 
> uptime is a big deal.

That's what we were working on at Cisco... we partnered with Videotron 
up in Montreal and were trying to boil the entire telco ocean from the 
get-go with all of its features, guarantees, etc. The way it's turned 
out, nobody really cares about 90% of those features so we were wasting 
valuable time to get out an mvp instead. Hindsight, of course.

I never did hear whether all of the elaborate QoS schemes that John 
Chapman and the rest of the docsis folks were working on ended up 
getting used, or whether they really matter much anymore since voice is 
so low bandwidth.

Mike